Biography / Academic Interests
:Athanasios Koutavas is a paleoclimatologist investigating past climate variability with a focus on tropical ocean regions. Of greatest interest in this framework is the paleoceanographic evolution of the El Nino/Southern Oscillation in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, and its interaction and linkages with climate events and cycles around the globe. The timescales of highest interest are the Holocene and Pleistocene, including the great ice-age cycles of the last million years. This work strives to establish connections between tropical sea surface temperatures and patterns of hydrologic change over land and ocean. The goal is to understand how external climate forcings and internal ocean-atmosphere dynamics have interacted to drive past wet-dry and warm-cold climate oscillations. The understanding and geologic perspective gained from these investigations provides a critical foundation for predicting and anticipating analogous responses to future climate change and their impacts on human societies.